Friday, April 13, 2012

A Post For a Friday

A satellite launch North Korea had hailed as a moment
of national pride ended in failure Friday when the rocket disintegrated
over the Yellow Sea, earning Pyongyang embarrassment as well as
condemnation from a host of nations that deemed it a covert test of
missile technology.

The launch is a setback for new leader Kim
Jong Un, whose government had projected the satellite as a show of
strength amid North Korea's persistent economic hardship. Kim is
solidifying power following the death of his father, longtime leader Kim
Jong Il, four months ago.

The U.N. Security Council said it deplores the launch, saying it violated two council resolutions.

(Sidebar: well, that showed them!)

In
a rare move, Pyongyang acknowledged that the rocket did not deliver a
satellite, but it also pressed ahead with grandiose propaganda in praise
of the ruling Kim family.

The United States and South Korea
declared the early morning launch a failure minutes after the rocket
shot out from the North's west coast. North Korea acknowledged that some
four hours later in an announcement broadcast on state TV, saying the
satellite that the rocket was carrying did not enter orbit.

This is the third failed rocket and with it, no doubt, the newest batch of North Korean scientists and workers to go into one of North Korea's many concentration camps.

By going ahead with the launch, Pyongyang has sacrificed 240,000 metric
tons of food aid from the United States, which the Obama
administration had signed off on
Feb. 29 ahead of the announced launch. To put this in perspective, this
is a country that's military recently had to lower the minimum required
height for its soldiers to 4 feet, 9 inches because of chronic
malnutrition, the Los Angeles Times reports. One-third
of North Korean children are believed to be "permanently stunted"
because of a lack of food. Additionally, Amnesty International has reported that crippling food shortages have forced malnourished North Koreans to eat grass and tree bark just to survive. Last year, diplomats reported
that in some areas government rations of cereals had been cut in half,
down to 150 grams a day per person in some areas, down from the good old
days when the majority of the country was issued 700 grams per day.
The photo above shows children between the ages of four and five
suffering from malnutrition in a nursery in Kangwon province in North
Korea. Even international affairs experts are baffled by country's
decision. "What is perplexing is that they left benefits on the table,"
the Council on Foreign Relations' Scott Snyder told the Times. "Normally
they would cash in on the agreement before reneging."

The one exception in media coverage has been in East Asia, where the UBC program was reported on aggressively. Besides The Ubyssey, the only interview Park has given was to a reporter from Japan’s second-largest newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun. The Asahi had run an article on the KPP based on a leak by an unnamed source, and Park wanted to clear up the article’s “misinformation.”

“I mainly stuck to the facts,” Park says about her Asahi
interview. She clarified where the professors were from: five from Kim
Il-Sung University, North Korea’s premier higher learning institute, and
one from the Jong Jun Thaek University of Economics. Asahi had
also reported the professors were taking Master of Business
Administration (MBA) degrees at UBC, which was not true; they were
taking a mix of graduate and undegraduate courses.

There is good reason for Park to tread carefully with the media. The
KPP is rife with political sensitivity. North Koreans see a “direct
connection between economic and political change,” says Evans.

Park urged The Ubyssey to hold back from terms like “opening
up,” “reform” and “capitalism,” words that have been preached to the
North Koreans for centuries. Park is also careful not to lump the two
Koreas together; that’s why the KPP is not run through UBC’s Centre for
Korean Research, which she directs.

Not everyone thinks the KPP is a good idea. Right-wing blogs such as
Blazing Cat Fur have attacked the program, accusing UBC of “hosting
monsters from a prison nation that jails and murders entire families.”

They also refer to CanKor, an online journal on North Korean
affairs that Evans and other UBC professors contribute to, as a
“propaganda site” for the North Korean regime.

This negative pushback is one reason why it is hard to get
information on the KPP’s donors. Park says they donate on condition of
anonymity, though she confirmed that neither the Canadian government nor
UBC has funded it.

How many North Koreans get to travel outside of North Korea for holiday or educational purposes? Aside from theelite, none. One sees either defectors or slave labour ever exit the Stalinist state. The program at UBC is nothing more than a useful idiot propaganda campaign (possibly an espionage campaign) for a state that would do thisto its people:

Only a small number of prisoners in the labor camps are even eligible for release. While there are a fair number of escape attempts — every former kwanli-so prisoner interviewed for this report witnessed multiple public executions of persons caught trying to escape — there are only two known successful escape attempts.

As to the funding of the Knowledge Partnership Program (KPP). I checked the UBC Institute for Asian Research (IAR) web site:http://www.iar.ubc.ca/

and as of this writing it is down (!!!) (Goes to show you the
competence of university know-it-alls). We should check to see if
it posts a financial annual report. One could also e-mail UNB financial
services to see if it publishes an annual report for this Institute.

and checked to see if the feds gave directly to the KPP or the IAR --
and they do not. The feds gave mucho dollars to UBC -- and there are
about 10 citations in the above link. This stands to reason, since UB
operates much like my university of UNB in New Brunswick. What happens
is that all federal money gets channeled to the main university
operating funds -- whereby the university takes a 10% cut off the top
(for overhead services), then gives the remaining 90% to the grant
recipient (and the recipient gets brownie points from the university for
obtaining external funds).

The problem with this is that it becomes difficult to trace federal
funding. For our purposes, in the 2010/11 year the feds gave the
following, from CIDA, to UBC:

I scanned other CIDA grants under the two budget envelopes, and the
above aren't that much (CIDA gave a whopping $600-m under both programs
combined), and not enough to sustain five or six PRK profs in Canada....

Finally, I did a check with the CRA charities division. The IAS is
not listed as a charity, bot obviously UBC is. I checked their lates
listing, for 2010/11:http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/...

and UBC received a total of $256.5-m from the feds, but a lot of this
is scientific research of one kind or another. They received $17.7-m
from overseas sources, and starting next year (we hope) UBC has to
itemize its foreign contributions -- if federal legistlation proceeds on
this front.